1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to management techniques of digital information contents, like for instance texts, books, music, photos, videos, films, files of various kind (e.g., programs for computers) and the like. Particularly, the present invention concerns a method for viewing, hereinafter “exploring”, by a user, a catalog of digital information contents, catalog that is structured according to hierarchies, or “taxonomies”, of information contents.
2. Discussion of the State of the Technique
The huge amount of information contents in digital format available nowadays for the fruition by users has induced to devise ways for their organization in the form of catalogs hierarchically structured, and for the exploration thereof.
A classical way for representing a hierarchy of digital information contents is the tree structure; the algorithm for the creation of the tree structure is applied starting from the leaf nodes until the root node is reached, and is repeated recursively. At every level of the structure, the brother nodes are positioned at a distance such as not to produce intersections therebetween, and the father node is positioned above the children nodes, in central position.
In the literature, various techniques have been proposed for the representation, on a display device of a user apparatus, of complex hierarchies of contents, and for allowing the exploration by the user, through his/her own apparatus, of said hierarchies.
In Robertson G.; Cameron K.; Czerwinski M.; Robbins D., “Animated visualization of multiple intersectings hierarchies”, Proc. IEEE InfoVis 2002, pp. 50-65, Boston, Massachussets, USA, Oct. 30-31, 2002. Computer Society Press., a method is presented to represent multiple hierarchies that intersect each other. The adopted display technique is called “visual pivot” and allows simultaneously showing two or more hierarchies with the “focus” on the node at which they intersect, called “pivot point”. The authors propose two types of visualization: in the first one one hierarchy is shown at a time, and, when displaying another hierarchy having a node in common with the previous hierarchy, an animation is provided for, that shows the link between the two hierarchies, in such way that the user does not loose the view of the context; the second type shows more hierarchies simultaneously, placed side by side with conjunction lines between the shared nodes. In order to define these hierarchies, a preliminary classification of all the entities of the dominion and a definition of their attributes is required. A language similar to SQL (Structured Query Language), called PQL, allows performing quieres on a vast database classified according to several hierarchies.
A conceptual model also proposed in literature as a metaphor of navigation in a complex hierarchy of digital information contents is the so-called “subway map”.
For example, in Nesbitt, K., “Getting to more Abstract Places using the Metro Map Metaphor”, Eighth International Conference on Information Visualisation, London, IEEE Computer Society, 2004, pp. 488-493, there is shown how a series of abstract concepts, belonging to a series of conceptual threads, can effectively be represented as a subway map. Every concept corresponds to a station of the imaginary subway and every concept thread is represented by a line of the imaginary subway. Concepts that belong to several threads become stations in which different lines of the imaginary subway intersect.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,462,762 describes a method to facilitate the navigation among nodes of a tree structure. The role of “root” is assigned to different nodes of the tree based on the selection by the user of a node in the selected taxonomy, delimiting a section of the whole structure.
US 2002/113816 proposes a method to provide a graphic user interface to represent and to navigate in hierarchical nets, particularly for the exploration of a catalog of data hierarchically organized. The proposed method provides for the management of a set of objects connected to each other by hierarchical relationships and to move through the relationships on the horizontal plane and in depth on the vertical plane.